February 10, 2011
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Elfworld Volume 2 #1
I have no idea how I missed the first issue of this series. This seems like something that’s right up my alley, as I like my small press comics with a sprinkling of dorky sorcerers and such, even though finding quality examples of that genre is exceedingly difficult (and hey, send me an e-mail if I’m wrong). I do have to say that I don’t think you’re allowed to start the second volume of a series if you only put out one issue in the first series, but I don’t get to make the rules on such things. With this lineup of talent it was pretty much a sure thing that this book would be damned near indispensable, and I think that ends up being accurate. First up is Grant Reynolds (who has either been quiet lately or he’s just stopped sending me review comics) with a tense chase between two creatures. Very few people outside of Jim Woodring can pull off “what the fuck IS that thing?” better than Grant and those skills are heavily on display here. Next is a piece by Alec Longstreth in which a wizard tries to audition new animals to deliver messages after his owl dies. I chuckled a few times and his cartoony art was perfect for this. Also a clear sign that this book wasn’t going to be either straight fantasy or straight parody of fantasy. Ben Costa and J.R. Parks are up next with a piece about the dangers of pulling a prank on your boss when you work in some kind of evil lair of doom. The Mute by David Enos deals with a mute (duh) wandering around, getting into adventures and saving the girl. Um, spoiler alert, but not really, because that’s not the end of the story so there. This was maybe the highlight of the book, although I may still contradict myself before finishing this review. Jane Samborski is next with a detailed list of dragon rating rituals listed by the types of dragon, and might I just add that this woman has a variety of dragon poses down cold, which I can’t imagine is an easy thing. Dash Shaw has a shortie next that’s the highlight of the book (see what I did there?) about an orc in his final moments before his execution. Brilliant, that’s what it was, and after a story that brutal it was nice to get a laugh out of the ending. Finally there’s a short Icecreamlandiaish (look up their other comics on this site to see what that means) by Eve Englezos and Joshua Moutray that I won’t get into because describing a one panel story is the same thing as ruining it. I guess if you hate all things fantasy you might not like this book, but even then there are pieces that only tangentially relate to fantasy, and it still has a pile of your favorite artists (if you have good taste, that is), so I’d say it’s worth picking up. I also need to mention the production design, as that Sammy Harkham cover and the work that Francois put into designing this book were both top-notch. Look closely at that cover; it took me a minute to get exactly what was going on there. So yeah, I’d say you should buy this book, and if the back of it is to be believed there will even be a new one out soon. $6
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Reviews | Tagged: Alec Longstreth, Ben Costa, Dash Shaw, David Enos, Elfworld, Eve Englezos, Francois Vigneault, Grant Reynolds, J.R. Parks, Jane Samborski, Josh Moutray, Sammy Harkham | 
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Posted by Kevin
February 9, 2011
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Panel #14: Panel of Horror
I was a little let down with this one. Oh, there are still great stories in here, but with a cover like that and with this crew finally tackling horror stories I probably just had unrealistic expectations. I did enjoy the intro and outro by Brent Bowman, although it could have done with a cringe-worthy pun or two. Dying Chords by (mostly) Craig Bogart dealt with a washed up singer, a never-was singer and how the former was trying to steal the one good song from the latter for a comeback. A an actual surprise ending in a horror anthology is always welcome, so kudos for that. Next up is Country Roads by Brent Bowman, which is one of the strongest pieces in the book, dealing with a man and his relentless quest to hunt down a werewolf. OK, fine, I saw the ending coming a mile away, but I also watch FAR too many horror movies. Molly Durst has the longest piece in the book with Monster Racers, and I could go either way on this one. On the one hand I like her simplistic art and enjoyed the madcap nature of a gaggle of monsters (I believe “gaggle” is the correct term) who are trying to get to a castle before Dracula. On the other hand it’s a story of several monsters traveling from point A to point B and we never even had much of a clue why it was so important to get to the castle first. Tom Williams, as always, saves the day with The Basket, a story of a evil basket and its place in history. Yes, it is just as awesome as it sounds. Finally there’s Healing, the creepiest piece in the book by far, by Dara Naraghi and Andy Bennett. It tells the story of a man who has long distrusted doctors but ends up having to go to a dentist. He got back in some considerable pain but decided to take matters into his own hands and ends up going a little bit too far. Like I said, I don’t hate this anthology, but in all honesty I probably wasn’t going to be happy with anything that wasn’t 100 pages long and featured serious gore and/or scares. They still put out a hell of a comic, as always, and you do have to buy this one to keep your collection of Panel anthologies intact, so lucky for you there are still some exceptional stories in here. $4
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Posted by Kevin
February 8, 2011
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Now Available! $5
Supertalk #1
I love that cover. Absolutely perfect for the title, and if you ask me to explain that belief I will run away from you at top speed. This is an anthology put together by Eric Watkins, or at least published by Eric Watkins, and it features all sorts of folks that I’ll get into more in a minute. You could maybe say that talking was the unifying theme, but you would most likely be wrong, as these stories are all over the place. J.T. Yost is up first with a funny short piece on the daily lives of pigeons. Next is Sung Yoon Choi with a piece about how she never knew her parents and was raised by her Aunt (or at least the character in her story was, I have no idea if this is autobiographical). That one seemed to end very suddenly, so maybe there’s more out there, or maybe it was just meant to end suddenly and I didn’t get it. This will take forever to review at this rate, and it’ll be a mess anyway because of a lack of a table of contents (although at least the artists were listed in order of their appearance), so how about I mention my highlights? There’s Paul Hoppe with a reverse ventriloquism strip, Adam Kidder with Fundar the Funbarian (it’s just as fantastic as it sounds), James Turek with a piece about crashing into a car that’s already on the way to the hospital, Andres Vera Martinex with his introduction to Chicago life and Chris Butzer with a story on the fog of doom. There are plenty of other interesting bits and pieces in here, and one thing that immediately stood out was the sheer diversity of the artists. If you buy anthologies looking for a pile of new and potentially interesting artists, this is an excellent showcase. Naturally, I didn’t love everything about it (those anthologies are few and far between), but there’s more than enough good stuff in here to make it worth checking out. $5
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Posted by Kevin
February 6, 2011
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Jury Rigged Comics #3: Adaptations
In case you were wondering, yes, this comic features adapted stories from other sources. Sean gets into it all in the intro, although he mostly doesn’t mention what they’re adapted from. Ah well, I guess this means I have to judge the comic all by itself and not on the source material, which is how it should be anyway. The first two pieces are drawn by David Beyer Jr., with the first dealing with the unbreakable promise of a samurai and the second dealing with Thor trying to trick a giant into giving him back his hammer. Mythical Thor in the modern day is always funny to me (yes, I know that he has his own comic, but Marvel Thor is just barely mythical Thor) and, much as it pains me not to spoil it, the setting Thor winds up in is even funnier. Trust me on this one. The samurai piece is also fun, if maybe a bit predictable. Or at least it was predictable to me, as I have read all comics and stories ever and it’s all predictable to me. Next up is Ark, done entirely by Sean, and this is what brought it all crashing down, at least briefly (it’s a very short story). There’s an asteroid, see, and it breaks entirely through a planet. It lands on another planet, and everything I say from here is sheer guesswork, as I have no idea what happens next. It looks like it either smashes through many people, killing them brutally, or the asteroid turns out to have been filled with eyes, ears, and other squiggles. If I wasn’t away from home at the moment I’d go back to the issue of Spudd that had this story drawn by another artist to make a bit more sense of it, but my instinct is saying that this story was better off left alone. Marginalia (drawn by Brent Bowman) is up next, and it’s fantastic. It’s the story of a Sean reading a used book in school and not thinking all that much of the notes in the margins until he gets to the very end and, again without spoiling, it is indeed a fantastic ending. It details the story of a brute of a dentist who would pull teeth out by hand, how he married a wealthy woman and couldn’t keep his temper in check. Finally there’s essentially the famous speech from Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet, but as told to a toddler, so there’s no cursing involved. It is an engrossing and hilarious piece of work (text, not comic), which makes this book four for five on the really excellent content. I’d say that makes it worth taking a look, wouldn’t you?$2
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Posted by Kevin
February 4, 2011
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A Collection of Comics
It’s best to get my complaint out of way at the beginning: that title is stupid. There, I said it. Of course this is a collection of comics; every comic produced that doesn’t follow one story is a collection of comics. That being said, the content is various shades of brilliant, and I mean that literally. The first half of the book is a silent pictorial representation of the Tower of Babel being built followed by the deity that so many folks seem to actually believe in causing everyone to speak in tongues and wandering off in confusion. Every page of this deserves to be on the wall of a fancy art house somewhere, and I’d know more about where that might be if I had spent much time in fancy art houses. The colors are vibrant, explosive and utterly perfect for the story they’re telling. He also includes the relevant bible passages for this story so you can see exactly what he’s trying to convey on each page. Seriously, this review is about to explode from hyperbole overload, but I don’t know if I’ve seen a more appropriate use of the colors available to tell a story. Everything after this was bound to be a bit of a letdown, but John manages to hold it together for the other three stories. There’s a lost man trying to catch his plane, a man drawing a portrait of a woman and maybe being a bit too honest with it and a fight scene for all you action fans out there. That last one dissolves into blobs of paint and goo, which is some strange way was the perfect ending to a book that started off so tightly depicted. You can read all of these pieces for free on his website, although I’ll bet that you could also order the book if you asked John nicely about it. I have no idea of the price, but it’s in full color and it’s the size of a magazine, so I’d guess at least $7.
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Posted by Kevin
February 3, 2011
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Now Available! $4
It’s Dream Time, Snoop Doggy Dogg
You know, if J.T. is going to keep going with the dream comics (which he should) then he might want to think about drifting away from the Snoop angle. After all, Snoop can’t be in that many of his dreams, but he clearly has other interesting dreams to talk about. This one features all kinds of famous names in his dreams like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Roseanne Barr, Dick Cheney and Henry Rollins. Sadly no, they were not all part of the same dream, although if those four sat down at a table for a pay-per-view I’d watch it. Dreams include Snoop suddenly changing his facial hair and trying to sell t-shirts (although his facial hair had gone back to normal by that point), J.T. driving Cheney to his creepy house (Cheney’s, not J.T.’s) and then debating the wisdom of accepting a pill from Cheney, Roseanne (as his mother, apparently) worrying about evil spirits, Arnold giving him relationship advice and Henry Rollins selling deep fried hot dogs. He also throws in another dream with zero celebrities in it where he also talks about the dream that he has just had about Snoop for good measure, but there’s other worldly concerns mixed into it. I love the lack of any sort of fixed location in these dreams, as that can be something that dream comics get wrong. He has the feel of dreams pretty well captured, then combines it with a series of engaging stories. Yeah, I’d say that he should start thinking about a new title and maybe making this a regular thing. Either that or become best friends with Snoop Dogg so he’s more likely to have dreams about the guy… $4
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Posted by Kevin
February 2, 2011
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Skully Flower #3
Yep, that title sums this right up. Dragon (yes, that is her real name) starts off with a thorough and engaging introduction, which should come in the “Comics 101” class, but enough people making continuing series don’t bother, so I like to point out the ones who do. Anyway, Skull Flower is still settling in, getting to know the local stuffed animals, when Hydra walks in on them all meditating. Hydra is the woman who rescued Skully from the graveyard, in case you haven’t been following this series. Hydra can’t maintain her concentration and ends up in front of the teevee, until eventually a ghost unplugs it to free them. Hydra can’t see said ghost (despite being voted “most psychic” in high school) and the rest of the issue deals with them all trying to figure out who the ghost is, what it wants and how they can help it. There was also a mix-up involving a missing panel that apparently wasn’t noticed until after the books were printed, but Dragon managed to get it into the book anyway so that the narrative flow isn’t interrupted. I thought that was a nice touch, seeing as how she could have panicked and thrown the whole thing away or just given up on comics altogether at that moment, so kudos to her for that. I suppose that seems like a silly thing to praise somebody for, but you’d be surprised how many comics make it to me with glaring errors that almost have to have been caught at some point in the process, yet there they are, still screwed up. It’s another fun book in her series, and it’s hard not to like something that features a stuffed animal that tries to cheer people up by hugging them. $5
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Posted by Kevin
January 30, 2011
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Smoo #3
It’s depressing to think that this comic only has a print run of 50 copies. Oh sure, Simon can always make more, and he has plenty of free comics up at his website, so it’s not like his work is barely visible. Still, it’s a sad testament to a lack of any sort of financial reward for doing really exceptional work. Are you kids today even buying comics, or just sticking with the free stuff on websites? As I’m officially in my mid 30’s now and I’ve been saying “you kids” for at least 15 of this years, I think it’s perfectly appropriate of me to ask that question, as a general disconnect with what has been considered popular has been a constant theme in my life. As this isn’t supposed to be about me, it’s a good thing that the first piece in this book deals with Simon’s general annoyance with his cell phone while still understanding that it’s more or less a necessity at this point. Yes, people DO forget that it’s just a tool. It also fits in nicely with the overall theme of this book, which is dealing with anxiety. Simon tells the story of a peaceful time, or at least a time when things were getting more peaceful, before he started getting threatening phone calls. The specifics of this are left out, which is a good thing for Simon and a bad thing for nosy people like me who always want more information. Anyway, the rest of the book deals with Simon trying to get a handle on his fear, how it’s always lurking around him somewhere, how he really doesn’t have it so bad after all and how throwing himself into mindless tasks doesn’t always work as a distraction. I loved it, but I’m pretty much officially biased towards the Smoo series at this point, so what do I know? It’s listed on his site as (if I’m getting the conversion rate right, and I most likely am not) roughly $4, so if you hurry you’ll be able to red it and make up your own mind. If not, he has the first piece of this book up at his site for free, so you should at least go read that.
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Posted by Kevin
January 29, 2011
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Now Available! $7
Big Breasted Vampire Death
Go ahead, just try to not judge a book by its cover after seeing that. I dare you. As a reviewer, it’s a little tricky to tackle something like this, as reasoned analysis has very little place next to enormous breasts, so I’ll try to simplify this for potential buyers of this book. Is there nudity? Yes, plenty of it, and some sex too. Hm. Come to think of it, that’s probably the only question for a whole lot of people. OK, for whoever is still reading, how about this one: is there a good story? Surprisingly, yes. Well, at least mostly. It isn’t going to win any awards, that’s for sure, but I found myself surprised by a few swerves here and there and loved the ending. Overall, there’s not a whole lot going on. The comic is about four female vampires with very large breasts who are traveling to see a country music band. I know, it ruined some vampire stereotypes for me too. Three brothers are also driving to see the show, and they happen upon a massacre from the ladies along the way. It was a little odd how their constant murdering was met with a general “meh” from the guys once they met, but maybe the giant breasts had something to do with that lenient reaction. Anyway, one of the vampires left a memento from an old lover at the scene, one of the guys picks it up, and a budding romance is born. The rest of the book involves them all getting to the concert, plenty of fights along the way, and the possible death of one of the characters. I say “possible” not to be vague and avoid spoilers but simply because I don’t know. Things didn’t look good for this character, but then there was a distant shot of them all together before the comic ended, so who knows. Overall? Overall I can’t believe anybody is still reading this review, as your mind was probably made up one way or the other pretty early on. It’s occasionally fun and smart, but it’s also occasionally trite and silly, and not necessarily in a good way. It’s a decent book, if you were judging it as a regular book, but nothing that will set the world on fire, even if it is in its second printing already. $7
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Posted by Kevin
January 28, 2011
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Stargazer Volume 1
Anybody who reads this site with any kind of regularity knows my stance on spoilers (short version: I hates ’em), but I have to point that that little hairy man from the cover isn’t in this volume. Well, there are some shadowy figures, so I guess it’s possible that he’s in this volume, but it sure doesn’t look like it. Hm. Anyway, this book deals with a young girl who is very distraught about the recent death of her grandmother. The early moments of the book are all about this and the family dynamic that comes from it, but don’t worry, that title comes into effect before too long. Marni (the main character) eventually has a sleepover with friends, they end up camping in the backyard and eat too much pizza… then things get weird. Marni has inherited an odd artifact from her grandma, and they’re all poking around at it when something flashes and they find themselves in a strange land. Oh, and the artifact is gone. The rest of the book is essentially them trying to get acclimated to this new place, as they find an old statue, a tiny robot guy, a boat and a few other things I probably shouldn’t get into. To top it all off Von has decided to put his notes in the back, so we get to see his thought process for how this would all eventually play out. He did take out the spoilers for future volumes, but I still skipped over most of it because I don’t want anything ruined and I’m a big enough dork to go back and read those notes after the series is finished anyway. I liked it overall, as it has a ton of potential, but this is still very much the early days of this saga. Well, I’m hopeful that it ends up being a saga, but you never know with comic finances the way they are. One quibble is that the characters had a tendency to stutter to convey seemingly any emotion, as the mourners at the funeral were all about stuttering, then the kids were all about it whenever they ran into anything odd in the new world. That can be conveyed just as easily by a facial expression, says the guy who couldn’t draw a realistic person if his life depended on it. Like a said, a mere quibble, and it should in no way be meant to indicate a lack of overall quality. The art is amazing (although I’m thinking future volumes will give Von more of a chance to flex his artistic muscles), the writing was excellent overall and I can’t wait to see what happens next, so that sure sounds like a success to me. $14.95
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Posted by Kevin
